


I Know All About Waiting

by AquitaineQueen24



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Growing up on Jakku can't have been a picnic, How on earth did Rey manage to stay so positive?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2018-05-01 18:20:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5215925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AquitaineQueen24/pseuds/AquitaineQueen24
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Sometimes in the high heat, when she found shelter in the cool of the wrecks, she went a little strange and thought of her clothes as funerary wrappings put on corpses before they were left out for the little scavengers in the sands. She and every single other person on Jakku is a corpse too, fighting their way to get out of the grave-pit and scramble back up into the world of the living.'</p><p>Rey may be waiting for her family, but she's getting off Jakku by herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know All About Waiting

**Author's Note:**

> I deliberately kept this very vague, since we know very little about Rey at this point other than that her family "ditched" her on Jakku when she was five and she's been waiting for them ever since. I'm sure when the film comes out it will prove me wrong.

Rey’s mother is a princess, and her father is a dashing scoundrel who swept her off her feet.

*

The first time she worked on a scavenging team she was eight, and they were picking apart a destroyer with former occupants that were still…juicy, sealed inside rooms where they’d been cooked alive by the crash but where the Jakku sun and wind and smaller scavengers, the little siblings, littler even than her and her fellow brats, couldn’t get to them. They oozed and dripped over chairs or the floor.

She didn’t have to go into those rooms, but the smell, the _smell._

*

One of Rey’s fathers’ was a politician from the old Galactic Senate, and the other was a commander in the Rebel Alliance. Or one was an Imperial Officer and the other was still in the Rebel Alliance as it became the Resistance, and they had a doomed love affair. Or they were both in the Rebel Alliance. Or they were both from the First Order.

Or they were just people trying to keep their heads down as ships screamed overhead and their worlds ended.

*

From the first moment she saw the AT-AT her mind, now hardwired to what could be taken or stripped from it, instead chattered _easy to keep out the wind and the storms I could sleep there and over there could be stores and maybe even a place to put a sonic shower yes yes this could work_

She staged moving in carefully, adding necessities, transporting her supplies bit by bit while embarking on or coming back from hunts, until finally she simply didn’t return to the camp at all and settled into her new home, her only home, her temporary home until she leaves this place and finds a better one out there in the stars.

*

Rey’s family left their old home because of the old war. Or because they were Resistance sympathizers. Or because they were followers of the First Order.They lived on a world full of water and plants and birds and cities and _no sand._ They didn’t live on a desert planet. Who would want to live (leave their daughter) on a world like Jakku?

*

No one else had found the X-Wing as far as she could see, and after she checked for any marauders who might be lying in wait she jumped off the tractor almost before it had stopped and sprinted towards the craft, making a list

 _so much plating power couplings windshield still in one piece oh and see if the phaser cannons still work oh oh all the_ things _I’ll get_

but she still took time, hauling herself up onto the main body, to look at the one sitting in the cockpit. She owed them that much.

There wasn’t much left of this one, not enough to even smell really, but she hauled the body out and got it to the sand, placing its’ so-dry limbs across its chest and its helmet across its face as tribute, due to the dead and an offering to the desert.

There was still meat enough on the bones to tempt her little brothers and sisters out of the sand; she settled down to the work of taking apart the X-Wing as those below took apart the pilot.

*

Rey has an older brother. Or a younger sister. Or a twin who hasn’t decided what they are. Or many, many siblings who’ve laughed and loved and grown up without her and might know about her and might not. She wants to know all of them hug and be hugged be kissed be loved when she finds them.

When she gets off Jakku and finds them.

*

She wanted to be friendly. She wanted to have people she loved and trusted; she remembered what it was like to be loved unconditionally, years ago. She was willing to love and trust.

(“If you love people, they kill you,” one of her scavenging crew, she couldn’t even remember their name now, had told her just before she set up on her own. “If you need people, they kill you.”)

But she wasn’t willing to be tricked and fleeced. It wasn’t that she couldn’t, wouldn’t trust or love, she told herself. It was just that the people around her either handed her gifts of herself and her heart back to her, or threw them in her face.

It was just as well. It would hurt more when she got off the planet, if she left someone she loved behind. Love and trust were waiting out there for her, with her family or with anyone, _anyone._

*

Rey’s family had a good reason for leaving her on Jakku.

They did. She knows they did.

Because if they _didn’t_ there’s only anger and hatred down that path, and that will do her no good. She won’t let rage help her escape. It must be hope.

*

Every wreck gave her more bounty. Every time she stepped into a tomb, raided a locker, robbed a grave of Imperials or Rebels, she was one step closer.

She was going to step out of her own grave. Sometimes in the high heat, when she found shelter in the cool of the wrecks, she went a little strange and thought of her clothes as funerary wrappings put on corpses before they were left out for the little siblings of the sands. She and every single other person on Jakku is a corpse too, fighting their way to get out of the grave-pit and scramble back up into the world of the living.

This might be a life for her little brothers and sisters, but she knows better, she knows more. This is no real life. This is a dead world and she is not going to suffer a half-life and die here.

She’s going to travel to the stars and wear beautiful clothes and fly in faster-than-light ships and eat wonderful food until she’s sick

and find her family and ask them _why why **why**_

**_and she’s going to live_ **

That evening she totted up her supplies, adding in what she’d managed to amass that day. She was getting there, slow but sure. Even in the midst of death there was the possibility for her life.

*

Rey’s family is coming back for her, one day. They will. They have to.

But if they don’t, she’s getting off this planet or dying a real death by trying.

**Author's Note:**

> The lines "If you love people, they kill you; if you need people, they kill you," comes from Colleen McCullough's 'The Thorn Birds' 
> 
> I plan to go over this some more, and maybe add further things to it when the film arrives. We'll see how it goes :)


End file.
